U.S. Pat. No. 6,931,600: “Integrating into an application objects that are provided over a network” to Pittman, filed Jan. 6, 2001 and incorporated herein by reference discloses a mechanism for integrating into a scene at a client an object that is defined by a set of data. The scene is displayed in a first display region of a display device. A selectable item is displayed in a second display region of the display device. The selectable item corresponds to the object but is generated based on less data than the set of data defining the object. User input is received that selects the selectable item displayed within the second display region for incorporation into the scene. In response to receiving the user input, the set of data is retrieved and the object is generated on the client based on the set of data and displayed within the scene in the first display region of the display device.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,122,647: “Dynamic generation of contextual links in hypertext documents” to Horowitz et. al., filed May 15, 1998 and incorporated herein by reference discloses creating contextual hypertext links relevant to a user-selected portion of a source document. The contextual links enable the user to dynamically associate the source document with any available target document, regardless of whether links where created between the source document and the target document when the source document was created. The method includes selecting terms relevant to the user-selected portion by linguistic analysis which selects the most frequently occurring terms. From the selected terms target documents relevant to the selected terms are identified. The target documents are selected by identifying topics that are associated with, or described by, the selected terms. Contextual links are created between the selected terms and target documents associated with the identified topics using the URLs for the documents in the contextual links. The system includes a knowledge base of topics, including hierarchical relations between topics, and associations of topics and terms. A document collection includes documents and references to documents, and URL or other addressing information for the documents. A tagging module receives a user-selected portion and selects terms to be used for the contextual links. A presentation module identifies the topics in the knowledge base associated with the selected terms, the documents associated with each topic, and creates the hypertext links between the terms and the documents.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,367,621: “Data processing method to provide a generalized link from a reference point in an on-line book to an arbitrary multimedia object which can be dynamically updated” to Cohen et. al., filed Sep. 6, 1991 and incorporated herein by reference discloses providing a generalized link in a data processing system to enable referencing from a point within an organized hierarchy of an on-line softcopy text, to an arbitrary multimedia object. The multimedia object may be represented by data which is also contained within the softcopy book or alternately which may be separate from the book as a separate file or a separate database. This enables an author at the time of writing the softcopy book, to specify specific multimedia hardware and software support for the display of multimedia presentations accompanying the text in the book. Provision is made for the author to specify alternate forms of multimedia presentation, where a particular specified multimedia apparatus or supporting software is not present at a workstation. An improved method for dynamically updating a softcopy book to a new edition is also disclosed.
None of these provide a user friendly experience in manipulating displayed documents created from remote components.